Chalcedony did not dare use her microwave projectors.
But she had other weapons, including a pinpoint laser and a chemical-propellant firearm suitable for sniping operations. Enemy humans were soft targets. These did not even have body armor.
She buried the bodies on the beach, following the protocols of war. It was her program to treat enemy dead with respect. Belvedere was in no immediate danger of death once she had splinted his leg and treated his bruises, but she judged him too badly injured to help. The sand was soft and amenable to scooping, anyway, though there was no way to keep the bodies above water. It was the best she could manage.
After she had finished, she transported Belvedere back to their rock and began collecting her scattered treasures.
The leg was sprained and bruised, not broken, and some perversity connected to the injury made him even more restlessly inclined to push his boundaries once he had partially recovered. He was on his feet within a week, leaning on crutches and dragging a leg as stiff as Chalcedony’s. As soon as the splint came off, he started ranging even further afield. His new limp barely slowed him, and he stayed out nights. He was still growing, shooting up, almost as tall as a Marine now, and ever more capable of taking care of himself. The incident with the raiders had taught him caution.
Meanwhile, Chalcedony elaborated her funeral necklaces. She must make each one worthy of a fallen comrade, and she was slowed now by her inability to work through the nights. Rescuing Belvedere had cost her much carefully hoarded energy, and she could not power her floods if she meant to finish before her cells ran dry. She could see by moonlight, with deadly clarity, but her low-light and thermal eyes were of no use when it came to balancing color against color.
There would be forty-one necklaces, one for each member of her platoon-that-was, and she would not excuse shoddy craftsmanship.
No matter how fast she worked, it was a race against sun and tide.
The fortieth necklace was finished in October while the days grew short. She began the forty-first—the one for her chief operator Platoon Sergeant Patterson, the one with the gray-blue Buddha at the bottom—before sunset. She had not seen Belvedere in several days, but that was acceptable. She would not finish the necklace tonight.
His voice woke her from the quiescence in which she waited the sun. “Chalcedony?”
Something cried as she came awake. Infant, she identified, but the warm shape in his arms was not an infant. It was a dog, a young dog, a German shepherd like the ones teamed with the handlers that had sometimes worked with Company L. The dogs had never minded her, but some of the handlers had been frightened, though they would not admit it. Sergeant Patterson had said to one of them, Oh, Chase is just pretty much a big attack dog herself, and had made a big show of rubbing Chalcedony behind her telescopic sights, to the sound of much laughter.
The young dog was wounded. Its injuries bled warmth across its hind leg.
“Hello, Belvedere,” Chalcedony said.
“Found a puppy.” He kicked his ragged blanket flat so he could lay the dog down.
“Are you going to eat it?”
“Chalcedony!” he snapped, and covered the animal protectively with his arms. “S’hurt.”
She contemplated. “You wish me to tend to it?”
He nodded, and she considered. She would need her lights, energy, irreplaceable stores. Antibiotics and coagulants and surgical supplies, and the animal might die anyway. But dogs were valuable; she knew the handlers held them in great esteem, even greater than Sergeant Patterson’s esteem for Chalcedony. And in her library, she had files on veterinary medicine.
She flipped on her floods and accessed the files.
She finished before morning, and before her cells ran dry. Just barely.
When the sun was up and the young dog was breathing comfortably, the gash along its haunch sewn closed and its bloodstream saturated with antibiotics, she turned back to the last necklace. She would have to work quickly, and Sergeant Patterson’s necklace contained the most fragile and beautiful beads, the ones Chalcedony had been most concerned with breaking and so had saved for last, when she would be most experienced.
Her motions grew slower as the day wore on, more laborious. The sun could not feed her enough to replace the expenditures of the night before. But bead linked into bead, and the necklace grew—bits of pewter, of pottery, of glass and mother of pearl. And the chalcedony Buddha, because Sergeant Patterson had been Chalcedony’s operator.
When the sun approached its zenith, Chalcedony worked faster, benefiting from a burst of energy. The young dog slept on in her shade, having wolfed the scraps of bird Belvedere gave it, but Belvedere climbed the rock and crouched beside her pile of finished necklaces.
“Who’s this for?” he asked, touching the slack length draped across her manipulator.
“Kay Patterson,” Chalcedony answered, adding a greenish-brown pottery bead mottled like a combat uniform.
“Sir Kay,” Belvedere said. His voice was changing, and sometimes it abandoned him completely in the middle of words, but he got that phrase out entire. “She was King Arthur’s horse-master, and his adopted brother, and she kept his combat robots in the stable,” he said, proud of his recall.
“They were different Kays,” she reminded. “You will have to leave soon.” She looped another bead onto the chain, closed the link, and work-hardened the metal with her fine manipulator.
“You can’t leave the beach. You can’t climb.”
Idly, he picked up a necklace, Rodale’s, and stretched it between his hands so the beads caught the light. The links clinked softly.
Belvedere sat with her as the sun descended and her motions slowed. She worked almost entirely on solar power now. With night, she would become quiescent again. When the storms came, the waves would roll over her, and then even the sun would not awaken her again. “You must go,” she said, as her grabs stilled on the almost-finished chain. And then she lied and said, “I do not want you here.”
“Who’s this’n for?” he asked. Down on the beach, the young dog lifted its head and whined. “Garner,” she answered, and then she told him about Garner, and Antony, and Javez, and Rodriguez, and Patterson, and White, and Wosczyna, until it was dark enough that her voice and her vision failed.
In the morning, he put Patterson’s completed chain into Chalcedony’s grabs. He must have worked on it by firelight through the darkness. “Couldn’t harden the links,” he said, as he smoothed them over her claws.
Silently, she did that, one by one. The young dog was on its feet, limping, nosing around the base of the rock and barking at the waves, the birds, a scuttling crab. When Chalcedony had finished, she reached out and draped the necklace around Belvedere’s shoulders while he held very still. Soft fur downed his cheeks. The male Marines had always scraped theirs smooth, and the women didn’t grow facial hair.
“You said that was for Sir Kay.” He lifted the chain in his hands and studied the way the glass and stones caught the light.
“It’s for somebody to remember her,” Chalcedony said. She didn’t correct him this time. She picked up the other forty necklaces. They were heavy, all together. She wondered if Belvedere could carry them. “So remember her. Can you remember which one is whose?”
One at a time, he named them, and one at a time she handed them to him. Rogers, and Rodale, and van Metier, and Percy. He spread a second blanket out—and where had he gotten a second blanket? Maybe the same place he’d gotten the dog—and laid them side by side on the navy blue wool.
They sparkled.
“Tell me the story about Rodale,” she said, brushing her grab across the necklace. He did, sort of, with half of Roland-and-Oliver mixed in. It was a pretty good story anyway, the way he told it. Inasmuch as she was a fit judge.
“Take the necklaces,” she said. “Take them. They’re mourning jewelry. Give them to people and tell them the stories. They should go to people who will remember and honor the dead.”
&
nbsp; “Where will I find alla these people?” he asked, sullenly, crossing his arms. “Ain’t on the beach.”
“No,” she said, “they are not. You’ll have to go look for them.”
But he wouldn’t leave her. He and the dog ranged up and down the beach as the weather chilled. Her sleeps grew longer, deeper, the low angle of the sun not enough to awaken her except at noon. The storms came, and because the table rock broke the spray, the salt water stiffened her joints but did not—yet—corrode her processor. She no longer moved and rarely spoke even in daylight, and Belvedere and the young dog used her carapace and the rock for shelter, the smoke of his fires blackening her belly.
She was hoarding energy.
By mid-November, she had enough, and she waited and spoke to Belvedere when he returned with the young dog from his rambling. “You must go,” she said, and when he opened his mouth to protest, she added, “It is time you went on errantry.”
His hand went to Patterson’s necklace, which he wore looped twice around his neck, under his ragged coat. He had given her back the others, but that one she had made a gift of. “Errantry?”
Creaking, powdered corrosion grating from her joints, she lifted the necklaces off her head. “You must find the people to whom these belong.”
He deflected her words with a jerk of his hand. “They’s all dead.”
“The warriors are dead,” she said. “But the stories aren’t. Why did you save the young dog?”
He licked his lips, and touched Patterson’s necklace again. “ ’cause you saved me. And you told me the stories. About good fighters and bad fighters. And so, see, Percy woulda saved the dog, right? And so would Hazel-rah.”
Emma Percy, Chalcedony was reasonably sure, would have saved the dog if she could have. And Kevin Michaels would have saved the kid. She held the remaining necklaces out.
He stared, hands twisting before him. “You can’t climb.”
“I can’t. You must do this for me. Find people to remember the stories. Find people to tell about my platoon. I won’t survive the winter.” Inspiration struck. “I give you this quest, Sir Belvedere.”
The chains hung flashing in the wintry light, the sea combed gray and tired behind them. “What kinda people?”
“People who would help a child,” she said. “Or a wounded dog. People like a platoon should be.”
He paused. He reached out, stroked the chains, let the beads rattle. He crooked both hands, and slid them into the necklaces up to the elbows, taking up her burden.
UNDER THE EAVES
LAVIE TIDHAR
“Meet me tomorrow?” she said.
“Under the eaves.” He looked from side to side, too quickly. She took a step back. “Tomorrow night.” They were whispering. She gathered courage like cloth. Stepped up to him. Put her hand on his chest. His heart was beating fast, she could feel it through the metal. His smell was of machine oil and sweat.
“Go,” he said. ‘You must—” the words died, unsaid. His heart was like a chick in her hand, so scared and helpless. She was suddenly aware of power. It excited her. To have power over someone else, like this.
His finger on her cheek, trailing. It was hot, metallic. She shivered. What if someone saw?
“I have to go,” he said.
His hand left her. He pulled away and it rent her. “Tomorrow,” she whispered. He said, “Under the eaves,” and left, with quick steps, out of the shadow of the warehouse, in the direction of the sea.
She watched him go and then she, too, slipped away, into the night.
In early morning, the solitary shrine to St. Cohen of the Others, on the corner of Levinsky, sat solitary and abandoned beside the green. Road cleaners crawled along the roads, sucking up dirt, spraying water and scrubbing, a low hum of gratitude filling the air as they gloried in this greatest of tasks, the momentary holding back of entropy.
By the shrine a solitary figure knelt. Miriam Jones, Mama Jones of Mama Jones’ shebeen around the corner, lighting a candle, laying down an offering, a broken electronics circuit as of an ancient television remote control, obsolete and useless.
“Guard us from the Blight and from the Worm, and from the attention of Others,” Mama Jones whispered, “and give us the courage to make our own path in the world, St. Cohen.”
The shrine did not reply. But then, Mama Jones did not expect it to, either.
She straightened up, slowly. It was becoming more difficult, with the knees. She still had her own kneecaps. She still had most of her original parts. It wasn’t anything to be proud of, but it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of, either. She stood there, taking in the morning air, the joyous hum of the road cleaning machines, the imagined whistle of aircraft high above, RLVs coming down from orbit, gliding down like parachuting spiders to land on the roof of Central Station.
It was a cool fresh morning. The heat of summer did not yet lie heavy on the ground, choking the very air. She walked away from the shrine and stepped on the green, and it felt good to feel grass under her feet. She remembered the green when she was young, with the others like her, Somali and Sudanese refugees who found themselves in this strange country, having crossed desert and borders, seeking a semblance of peace, only to find themselves unwanted and isolated here, in this enclave of the Jews. She remembered her father waking every morning, and walking to the green and sitting there, with the others, the air of quiet desperation making them immobile. Waiting. Waiting for a man to come in a pickup truck and offer them a labourer’s job, waiting for the UN agency bus—or, helplessly, for the Israeli police’s special Oz Agency to come and check their papers, with a view towards arrest or deportation . . .
Oz meant ‘strength’, in Hebrew.
But the real strength wasn’t in intimidating helpless people, who had nowhere else to turn. It was in surviving, the way her parents had, the way she had—learning Hebrew, working, making a small, quiet life as past turned to present and present to future, until one day there was only her, still living here, in Central Station.
Now the green was quiet, only a lone robotnik sitting with his back to a tree, asleep or awake she couldn’t tell. She turned, and saw Isobel passing by on her bicycle, heading towards the Salameh Road. Already traffic was growing on the roads, the sweepers, with little murmurs of disappointment, moving on. Small cars moved along the road, their solar panels spread like wings. There were solar panels everywhere, on rooftops and the sides of buildings, everyone trying to snatch away some free power in this sunniest of places. Tel Aviv. She knew there were sun farms beyond the city, vast tracts of land where panels stretched across the horizon, sucking in hungrily the sun’s rays, converting them into energy that was then fed into central charging stations across the city. She liked the sight of them, and fashion-wise it was all the rage, Mama Jones’ own outfit had tiny solar panes sewn into it, and her wide-brimmed hat caught the sun, wasting nothing—it looked very stylish.
Where was Isobel going? She had known the girl since she’d been born, the daughter of Mama Jones’ friend and neighbour, Irina Chow, herself the product of a Russian Jewish immigrant who had fallen in love with a Chinese-Filipina woman, one of the many who came seeking work, years before, and stayed. Irina herself was Mama Jones’ age, which is to say, she was too old. But the girl was young. Irina had frozen her eggs a long time ago, waiting for security, and when she had Isobel it was the local womb labs that housed her during the nine long months of hatching. Irina was a pastry chef of some renown but had also her wild side: she sometimes hosted Others. It made Mama Jones uncomfortable, she was old fashioned, the idea of body-surfing, like Joining, repelled her. But Irina was her friend.
Where was Isobel going? Perhaps she should mention it to the girl’s mother, she thought. Then she remembered being young herself, and shook her head, and smiled. When had the young ever listened to the old?
She left the green and crossed the road. It was time to open the shebeen, prepare the sheesha pipes, mix the drinks. There will be customers
soon. There always were, in Central Station.
Isobel cycled along the Salameh Road, her bicycle like a butterfly, wings open, sucking up sun, murmuring to her in a happy sleepy voice, nodal connection mixed in with the broadcast of a hundred thousand other voices, channels, music, languages, the high-bandwidth indecipherable toktok of Others, weather reports, confessionals, off-world broadcasts time-lagged from Lunar Port and Tong Yun and the Belt, Isobel randomly tuning in and out of that deep and endless stream of what they called the Conversation.
The sounds and sights washed over her: deep space images from a lone spider crashing into a frozen rock in the Oort Cloud, burrowing in to begin converting the asteroid into copies of itself; a re-run episode of the Martian soap Chains of Assembly; a Congolese station broadcasting Nuevo Kwasa-Kwasa music; from North Tel Aviv, a talk show on Torah studies, heated; from the side of the street, sudden and alarming, a repeated ping—Please help. Please donate. Will work for spare parts.
She slowed down. By the side of the road, on the Arab side, stood a robotnik. It was in bad shape—large patches of rust, a missing eye, one leg dangling uselessly—the robotnik’s still-human single eye looked at her, but whether in mute appeal, or indifference, she couldn’t tell. It was broadcasting on a wide band, mechanically, helplessly—on a blanket on the ground by its side there was a small pile of spare parts, a near-empty gasoline can—solar didn’t do much for robotniks.
No, she couldn’t stop. she mustn’t. It made her apprehensive. She cycled away but kept looking back, passers-by ignoring the robotnik like it wasn’t there, the sun rising fast, it was going to be another hot day. She pinged him back, a small donation, more for her own ease than for him. Robotniks, the lost soldiers of the lost wars of the Jews—mechanized and sent to fight and then, later, when the wars ended, abandoned as they were, left to fend for themselves on the streets, begging for the parts that kept them alive . . .
She knew many of them had emigrated off-world, gone to Tong Yun, on Mars. Others were based in Jerusalem, the Russian Compound made theirs by long occupation. Beggars. You never paid much attention to them.
Robots: The Recent A.I. Page 40
